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At Mouquin's

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On View

Date:

1905

Artist:

William GlackensAmerican, 1870–1938

About this artwork

William Glackens—a member of an association of artists called the Eight—was at the center of avant-garde American painting at the turn of the twentieth century. Rejecting the academic standards of the influential National Academy of Design in New York, Glackens and his fellow urban realists focused unflinchingly on the city around them, vividly recording the street life and leisure activities they encountered. Mouquin’s was a fashionable New York restaurant frequented by Glackens and artists of his circle. Combining portraiture with genre painting, he depicted the restaurateur James B. Moore sharing a drink with Jeanne-Louise Mouquin, the wife of the proprietor. The artist’s wife, Edith, and Charles Fitzgerald, a local art critic and champion of Glackens’s work, are reflected in the large wall mirror. Mouquin is the focal point of the composition; not only is her dress and cloak rendered with fluid, eye-catching brushstrokes, but her mysterious, abstracted gaze also creates an unresolved tension within the work. Perhaps Glackens intended to make a social commentary; many con-temporary writers maintained that anomie was one of the psychological consequences of rapid change in European and American cities. Criticized for its unabashed depiction of men and women drinking together, At Mouquin’s suggests the pleasures and the perils of modern life.

City Art Museum of St. Louis, William Glackens in Retrospective, 1966-1967; traveled to Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institute, New York City, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Lakeview Center for the Arts and Sciences, The Eight, Sept. 12-Nov. 9, 1969.

New York City, National Academy of Design, Turn-of-the-Century America, June 30, 1977-May 28, 1978.

New York City, Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Painters of Modern Life: Impressionism and Realism, 1994-1995; traveled to Ft. Worth, Amon Carter Museum, Denver Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

New York City, Whitney Museum of American Art, The American Century: Art and Culture, 1999.

Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Life's Pleasures: the Ashcan Artist's' Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925, August 2-October 28, 2007; traveled to New York Historical Society, November 18, 2007-February 10, 2008; Detroit Institute of Arts, March 2-May 25, 2008, New York and Detroit only.